It’s an eye-catching building – truly an inspired design from its architectural double-team, BAU and Grant Amon Architects – both locals, incidentally, with offices in Fitzroy St.
So, what actually is it that makes an architectural design “inspired”? The beauty of its geometry and form? The expression of its cultural functions and meanings? Its embrace of its surrounding context? All of the above, no doubt.
I’m wondering, though, if there’s also an ‘inspiration’ here from the fourth dimension, from an ancestral past? Allow me to introduce to you to Racine and Voltaire, the grand Victorian Boom-style pair of townhouses which stood on the Pride site between c1891 and the mid C20th.
Completely different generations, but, in character, so much in common — grandiose exuberance, lavish façade modeling, a multi-storey composition of central cavernous openings flanked by narrower elliptical openings each side, all surmounted by a great grandstand roof and party deck. Even their racy French names seem to foretell the theatrical and libertarian spirit of their C21st progeny.
I don’t know if our architects ever saw this picture before they designed the Pride Centre. We can ask them.
